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MR. GLADSTONE AT OXFORD 

1890 




THE RT. HON. W. E. GLADSTONE 



Frofitispi 



MR. GLADSTONE AT 
OXFORD 

1890 



BY 



WITH ILLUSTRATIONS 



NEW YORK : E. P. BUTTON & COMPANY 

31 WEST TWENTY-THIRD STREET 

LONDON : SMITH, ELDER, & CO. 

1908 



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1 
1 



Printed by Ballantvne, Hanson &" Co. 
At the Ballantyne Press, Edinburgh 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

THE RIGHT HON. W. E. GLADSTONE . Frontispiece ^ 

THE RIGHT HON. W. E. GLADSTONE 

AND MRS. GLADSTONE . . , . To face p. -z^ 

VIEW OF ROOMS AT ALL SOULS 
COLLEGE, OXFORD, OCCUPIED BY 
MR. GLADSTONE ,, 62.' 



The portraits are from photographs taken at Oxford, during 
the week of Mr. Gladstone's visit, by Miss Acland, for 
whose kindness the author is most grateful. 



MR. GLADSTONE AT OXFORD 

The following letters were written to a 
correspondent who was a devoted admirer 
of Mr. Gladstone from his earliest years. 
I, the writer (described in the letters as F.), 
had on the occasion of Mr. Gladstone's visit 
ceased to be a Fellow of All Souls College 
for a little over a year, but, though recently 
married, I obtained " leave from home " to 
spend in the College, whose hospitality is 
ever open to its *' quondams," the week 
from January 30 — February 7, 1890, with 
a view to writing down, for the benefit of 
the correspondent above mentioned, anything 
that I could collect of interest, and especially 
any of Mr. Gladstone's famous conversation. 
Unfortunately only two of the letters are 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

really full, and there is a complete lacuna 
from February 3 to February 8. The 
letters concerning these days must have 
been lost or lent to friends, and cannot 
now be recovered. It has been thought 
desirable that some record of the memorable 
visit^ — Mr. Gladstone's last visit but one to 
the Oxford he so dearly loved — should be 
published. For he came but once more, at 
the beginning of the Michaelmas Term, 1892, 
to deliver the first Romanes Lecture, when 
he was Prime Minister for the fourth time. 
On that occasion he was the guest of Dean 
Paget at Christ Church. 

Probably any Fellow of the College, of 
which I was certainly the least distinguished 
member, could have given a better account 
of all that we heard and felt ; and my only 
excuse for publishing these letters is that, so 
far as is known, no other record of his con- 
versations in the College now exists. The 
letters as they stand were, with one exception, 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

written late at night, often occupying from 
three to four hours after Mr. Gladstone had 
gone to bed, which he usually did at about 
half-past ten ; and as they were then intended 
for no eyes but those of the correspondent 
to whom I had been in the habit all my life 
of writing almost daily, they are necessarily 
scrappy and fragmentary. But it has been 
thought better to give them as they were 
written, and no attempt has been made to 
dress them up or to rectify the errors of 
diction, except by the expansion of symbols 
and abbreviations and by punctuation — save, 
indeed, in the case of the letter dated 
February 8, which, for reasons unconnected 
with Mr. Gladstone's visit, had to be recast. 
When looked at after seventeen years much 
of them appears very trivial, and they 
certainly give a very imperfect account of 
the extraordinary volume and vivacity of 
Mr. Gladstone's talk. Since his death 
several friends have asked me to publish 
3 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

them, but it was not till January of last 
year that I took the preliminary step of 
asking Mr. John Morley's advice on the 
subject. Mr. Morley is, as Mr. Gladstone 
was, an Honorary Fellow of the College, 
and he gave me every possible encourage- 
ment, and most kindly allowed me to use 
his name as approving of the scheme ; 
*' for," he said, " I am convinced that the 
more that is known about Mr. Gladstone 
the greater he will appear." He recom- 
mended me to ask a further sanction from 
Mr. Henry Gladstone, who, on behalf of his 
family, gave it in the most gracious manner 
possible ; and the cup of kindness was filled 
up by the Warden of All Souls, who pro- 
mised me the assistance that was in his 
power, and his only, to give. 

The relations existing between all Fellows, 
past and present, of All Souls College, which 
yearly becomes, according to the beautiful 
prayer appointed for our Founder's Day, 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

"the fruitful mother of more happy chil- 
dren," have always been peculiarly intimate 
and brotherly — more so, I believe, than 
similar relations in any society with such a 
standing and such a history ; and for this 
reason I have thought it better to designate 
each of the actual members of the College 
who took part in the conversations which 
I have recorded merely by initials. Those 
of us who were present will probably recog- 
nise to whom these initials refer, and it does 
not concern any one else to know. My 
readers, outside our own circle, will only 
care to know about Mr. Gladstone, whose 
words are here as literally recorded as my 
memory after the lapse of a few hours could 
record them. 

I must be allowed, however, one or two 
words of preface concerning my own im- 
pressions of the man, which I am allowed 
to supplement by some received from other 
Fellows. I was not at all prepared for the 
5 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

spell he cast upon me, for, being an intole- 
rant Tory and a strong Erastian, I regarded 
both his theological opinions and everything 
he had done in politics since 1868 with the 
greatest abhorrence. But I immediately fell, 
as I believe every one did, under the spell — 
I can only call it a spell — of his rich, low, 
ringing voice and of the marvellous vivacity 
and flow of his conversation. Two remark- 
able instances of this " spell " have been 
communicated to me by Fellows of the Col- 
lege who were present at an earlier visit of 
Mr. Gladstone, which took place in No- 
vember 1888, in circumstances described as 
follows by W. R. A. :— 

" When Dr. Talbot was Warden of Keble 
Mr. Gladstone used from time to time to 
pay visits to him and Mrs. Talbot, and on 
these occasions he was accustomed very cour- 
teously to call upon me, as Head of the 
College of which he was an Honorary Fel- 
low. Not being informed beforehand of 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

these visits, I had always failed to meet him, 
and on one occasion, when I heard from the 
Talbots that he was coming to them, I asked 
them to arrange that Mr. Gladstone should 
come at an hour in the afternoon when 1 
could take him into the coiFee-room and 
introduce some of the Fellows to him. Mr. 
Gladstone very kindly fell in with the pro- 
posal, and named an hour for his visit. I 
gave notice to the Fellows, and a party of 
them assembled in the cofFee-room to give 
him tea. The visit took place in November 
1888, and led, I think, to the longer sojourn 
in 1890, for Mr. Gladstone was evidently 
pleased with the cordiality of his welcome. 
This is indicated by the letter in which he 
proposed to come up in 1890. The letter 
runs as follows : — 

" ' Hawarden Castle, nr. Chester, 
^'^ Christmas D. 89. 

" ' Dear Mr. Warden, — When I was 
last at Oxford, and was very kindly received 
7 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

at All Souls, all other kindness was crowned 

by an invitation, or suggestion, that I should | 

pay a visit to the College in the capacity of \ 

Honorary Fellow. } 

" ' This means, I imagine, for the time, \ 

rooms, commons. Hall and Chapel ; and ] 

such a vision of renovated youth has a great j 

charm for me. i 

" ' It would be in my power to de- j 

vote a week to this purpose on or about j 

January 30 — and I have put on a front of i 

sevenfold brass to ask whether I really j 

may ? j 

" ' If I may, I should wish only to make j 

one condition — that of disturbing nobody i 
and nothing ; and to know whether, in order 

to insure giving no trouble, I might bring a 1 
servant who, I can answer for it, would give 

no sort of offence. i 

" ' I rely on your kindness to let me 

know whether time or any other impedi- \ 

ment makes it desirable to adjourn this pro- j 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

posal. — Believe me, dear Mr. Warden, faith- 
fully yours, W. E. Gladstone. 

" ' The Warden of All Souls'. " 

Thus C. G. L. writes : " Mr. Gladstone 
arrived in the afternoon and was brought by 
the Warden into the coffee-room to be intro- 
duced to the Fellows. M. B. had expressed 
in vigorous terms his conviction that he 
could not conscientiously meet Mr. Glad- 
stone, but had been persuaded to join in the 
reception. Directly Mr. Gladstone heard 
his name he said, * Ah, Professor, it is one 
of the charms of Oxford that one meets at 
every moment some one with whose name 
in some branch of learning one has long been 
familiar.' M. B. beamed with obvious plea- 
sure, and at once surrendered to the spell. 
Soon after I saw him trotting about after 
Mr. Gladstone with the sugar and cream- 
jug. The other person whom Mr. Glad- 
stone singled out for attention was the great 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

academic champion of the Liberal Unionist 
cause." 

T. R. also notices this. " Conscious of 
certain passages at arms that other Pro- 
fessor, when he entered the room and saw 
who was there, was going to sit down at 
a distance ; but Mr. Gladstone seized him 
and began, ' Oxford is too interesting ! I 
did not expect to have the opportunity of 
meeting you,' and with this he led his 
opponent to a sofa and began to take a 
lesson in the Law of the Constitution." 

Yet I think that two things struck me 
even more than the spell which he cast — 
namely, Mr. Gladstone's beautiful sim- 
pHcity and his perfect courtesy. He was 
much the "finest gentleman" I ever met; 
and the result was that every one, down 
to the humblest College servant, felt the 
better for being in his presence. All sorts 
of tales were going round Oxford at the 

10 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

time and for months afterwards of the 
strange things he had said and done ; 
some very ungenerous things were said, 
among others that he had affected a High 
Toryism in order to please people here. 
Apart from the fact that he was wholly- 
incapable of affectation, I am quite sure 
that that would be the wrong way to put 
it. It is true that the Oxford, and even 
at times the world in which his thoughts 
seemed to be moving, were not the Oxford 
or the world of that day ; he often genuinely 
and honestly said that he looked back with 
regret to " unreformed " Oxford. 

As C. W. O. says: "He was full of 
anecdotes and illustrations of the most 
interesting kind, but I noted that they all 
bore on the earlier half of his political 
career. He told us much about such 
people as Lord Melbourne, Lord Aber- 
deen, and Lord Palmerston, but practically 
II 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

nothing of what happened after 1866; he [ 
never in my hearing mentioned Disraeli j 
... of his own Oxford life he was ever 
ready to speak." 

But I think any one who has studied 

Mr. Morley's splendid biography will see 

this temper of its hero constantly reflected 

in its pages ; while, as for affectation, Mr. 

Gladstone and affectation within a day's 

march of each other are inconceivable. 

His conservatism — that seems to be the 

best word for it — was by no means merely 

academic. I never saw any sign, other 

than his universal courtesy, that he was 

trying to conciliate, by a display of this 

mental attitude, his political opponents ; 

but when he came here it was as if he 

had stepped backwards over a gulf. "He 

became once more," says T. R., "the 

Junior Burgess for the University whom 

Dr. Bullock Marsham had advised to guide 
12 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

himself by the example of Sir Robert 
Inglis. I fancy that there were indeed 
many Liberal principles which he had 
adopted without assimilating." But in 
academic matters this attitude was very 
clearly marked. His own political sup- 
porters, good academic Liberals, were ex- 
pected to sympathise with his views about 
the University which dated from 1847 at 
the very latest. It was the Chairman of 
the " Liberal Three Hundred " to whom 
he said, "I am sure, Sir William, your 
memory will bear me out in saying that a 
valuable element was lost to our social 
life with the disappearance of our noble- 
men and gentlemen - commoners." ^ He 
said in my hearing much the same thing 

1 "I am sure that you will agree with me that 
not merely Christ Church, but the University 
generally, and, I might almost add, our social life 
has suffered with the disappearance," &c. [Cor- 
rection by W. R. A.] 

13 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

to A. H. H., who tells me that, when he 
afterwards mentioned the fact to the late 
Lord Salisbury, that statesman drily re- 
marked : " When these privileged persons 
existed Mr. Gladstone was always urging 
their abolition." 

" He never concealed," says T. R., " his 
belief that the Oxford of 1890 was in 
certain respects inferior to the Oxford of 
1830. He was shocked, not without 
reason, at the laxity which allows young 
men to perambulate the streets in 
' shorts.' " 

And C. G. L. adds : " I remember 
vividly his answer to a question as to the 
chief differences which he noticed between 
undergraduates of this and of his own 
time : * I have no hesitation in saying that 
the most obvious difference is in the dress 
which they see fit to wear in the High 
14 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

Street. I was almost shocked with the 
spectacle of men in boating costume, in- 
deed I may say in very scanty costume, 
in the High Street. Such a thing would 
have been impossible in my time. We 
were much more concerned about our dress. 
I remember contemporaries — young men at 
Christ Church — who, when they were not 
hunting, made a point of promenading the 
High Street in the most careful attire. 
And some of them kept a supply of 
breeches which they only wore for that 
purpose, and in which they never sat down 
lest any creases should appear. I confess I 
think the undergraduates now seem to 
have passed to the other extreme.' "... 
So, too, C. W. O. says : " When asked, 
after his lecture at the Union, how an 
undergraduate audience of 1890 differed 
from one of his own youth, he replied 
that the main thing which he observed was 
that dress had become so careless. In his 
IS 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

youth, he said, there would have been 
dozens of men present, * who, with their 
two watch chains, their elaborate waist- 
coats, and their fashionable suits, could 
not have been dressed for £20 ' ; but in 
1890 he did not notice a man who could 
not have been dressed for ;!^io, and the 
general effect was rather slovenly." 

The proposal to dispense with viva voce 
in Responsions drew forth a sorrowful pro- 
test. Everything, he complained, was being 
made too easy. Both Greek and mathe- 
matics, he understood, were in danger be- 
cause they involved hard work. Even so 
harmless an institution as Liddell and Scott's 
Lexicon did not escape censure. Mr. Glad- 
stone had a word to say for Schrevelius : 
" You younger men have so many helps and 
appliances ! When there was only Schre- 
velius I had to make my own Homeric 

Lexicon, and the labour did me good." 
16 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

T. R. continues : *' We went for a little 
walk together, he and I, and he gave me in 
a meditative kind of way the points of his 
political relations with the University. What 
struck me was that he spoke not as a Liberal, 
but as an Oxford man who had gone into 
the Liberal party because the Tory party 
was under — influences; he lingered on the 
word ; no doubt Protectionism and Disraeli 
were in his mind. He still valued Oxford 
as a power counteracting dangerous tendencies 
in politics — especially the tendency to ignore 
the fatal effect which the absence of religious 
belief must have on society and Government. 
Politics were in our general conversations 
neither avoided nor led up to ; he was essen- 
tially iroKiriKov '(wov, and if he was inclined 
to talk even of the most modern politics he 
v/ould do so. But he was not ' the greatest 
member of Parliament that ever lived ' with- 
out being well aware of how to closure a 

discussion with perfect courtesy ; once I 
17 B 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 |' 

heard him administer a sharp and well- <] 

deserved rap ; several times I noticed how |i 

quickly he skated over thin ice, and was 

back on thick again." 

T. R.'s general estimate of the great 

personality of Mr. Gladstone runs as follows : 

'• Nobody could be better company in a house ^ 

than Mr. Gladstone was. He entered at once f 

into all the ways of the place. His hours of | 

work were carefully observed : he did not 1 

wait for the clock to strike, but rose from j 

his chair two minutes before the time. When i 

I saw him at work what impressed me was I 

the steadiness of his pace. Each minute he | 

laid so much of his task behind him like a ■■. 

labourer laying an even swathe. His great ! 

power of work was in some ways a disad- ■■ 

vantage to him. From morning till night I 

he was either taking something into his mind i 

or pouring it out again in words ; there were i 

none of those unoccupied times in which ' 

things settle down and take a clear outline, i 
i8 I 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

And this may partially account for his habit 
of lapsing out of one opinion into another 
without being conscious of the change. He 
went from breakfast to his desk, and seldom 
read the newspaper. One morning during 
his stay all the papers had reports of the 
case in which Mr. Parnell recovered large 
damages from the proprietors of the Times ; 
Mr. Gladstone heard of the event at 7.30 p.m. 
from one of his neighbours at dinner. 

" The charm of his talk cannot be rendered 
in description — the softness of the lower tones 
of the voice, the easy constant movement as 
he turned from one to the other : the clenched 
fist, the open palm, and the challenging fore- 
finger, which the House of Commons knew 
so well. Sometimes he seemed to drop out 
of the conversation, his eye looked veiled 
and tired ; but at the first sound of a name 
that appealed to him the veil seemed to lift, 
and he was watching the moment to speak. 
He spoke much but not continuously, for 
19 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

he always felt that Oxford was a place where 
he ought to be learning from the men who 
knew. • . . One admirable characteristic was 
his unwillingness to speak ill of any indi- 
vidual ; he spoke generously of opponents ; 
supporters who had turned against him called 
up a peculiar expression on his face, but he 
anxiously gave them their due. It must be 
remembered that in 1890 he was constantly 
chafed by having to sit on the same bench 
with the Liberal Unionist leaders. . . . He 
was not exactly a humourist, but he had a 
genuine sense of humour, displayed rather 
in manner than in forms of speech. One 
morning when we were at breakfast he came 
in with a brown loaf, supported on a sheet 
of paper in his hand. He came to the end 
of the table just as he might have come to 
the table of the House, and began : ' This 
loaf is presented by a baker who is pleased 
to describe himself as an admirer of mine.* 

He proceeded to give us a full account of 
20 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

the merits of the loaf." We finished the 
loaf: if I remember right it was a trifle 
heavy. "Then, sitting down and beginning 
his meal, he went on : ' The operations of 
my admirers reduce themselves on the aver- 
age and in the long run to a kind of balance : 
some of them present me with things which 
they suppose I want, and the others steal 
what I have ; ' he described the precautions 
which had to be taken at Hawarden to pre- 
vent enthusiastic tourists from carrying off 
his axes and other portable property." 

Letters 

Wednesday^ January 29, '90. — Mr. Glad- 
stone will dine in College on Friday, Satur- 
day, Sunday, and as many other days as he 
is not invited out. He is to breakfast in his 
own room. Whether he will lunch in the 
Buttery, or not, I don't knov/. T. R. — the 

Dean, whose duty it is to select the Fellows 
21 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

who are to read — swears he will make him 
read the lessons in Chapel. 






Mr. Gladstone did not breakfast in his 
own room, but each day, except once when 
I think he was invited elsewhere, came to 
the Common College breakfast in the Com- 
mon Room. This I always regarded as the 
pleasantest meal of the day, and he was 
always in extraordinarily good form at it. 
He used to sit on the left-hand side of the 
fireplace, and I remember his great admira- 
tion of the shape of the room. At dinner, 
although his talk was more sustained, it 
seemed to cost him a greater effort, and 
after nine o'clock he often yawned. It was 
certainly at the breakfast table that we 
juniors got the most out of him. 

W. R. A. thus describes an invitation 
which Mr. Gladstone received to a breakfast 
party at Magdalen. " During Mr. Glad- 

22 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

stone's visit, Sir Henry Acland invited Mrs. 
Gladstone to come and stay with him and wit- 
ness Mr. Gladstone's collegiate experiences. 
We all thought that Mr. G. somewhat resented 
this intrusion of the domestic into the aca- 
demic life, but, at any rate, his movements 
were unaffected by the presence of Mrs. 
Gladstone. She stayed with Sir Henry for 
two nights, was present when Mr. Gladstone 
delivered his address at the Union, and 
asked me whether there would be any objec- 
tion to her coming on the following morning 
to our chapel service, whereat Mr. Gladstone 
was a regular attendant. I begged Sir Henry, 
himself a ' quondam,' to bring her to chapel, 
and it was arranged that they should break- 
fast afterwards at my house. I then waylaid 
Mr. Gladstone as he was walking out to 
dinner, and asked him if he would join our 
breakfast party. Nothing, he said, would 
have given him greater pleasure than to 
breakfast with the Warden, ' but it so hap- 
23 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

pens that I am engaged to breakfast with the 
President of Magdalen, to meet the President 
of the University Boat Club, and the Captain 
of the University eleven.' " 

C. W. O. adds to this: ''It was while I 
was showing Mr. Gladstone round the 
Library, on the third day of his stay, that 
we were surprised to see Mrs. Gladstone 
enter. She told him that she had come to 
see that he did not over-exert himself, as she 
feared that he was seeing too much company. 
He replied, in the most affectionate but 
humorous tones, that many people had been 
telling him that there were too many ladies 
in Oxford, since the ladies' colleges had been 
set up, and that, if she carried him back to 
London at once, he was sure that these 
people would consider themselves quite jus- 
tified of their opinion ; for the rest, he said, 
he was ' enjoying himself mightily, and did 
not think that such a pleasurable visit could 

be doing him any harm.' " 
24 




THE RT. HON. W. E. GLADSTONE AND MRS. GLADSTONE 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

Concerning the breakfast party at Mag- 
dalen interesting reminiscences have been 
communicated to me by the President and 
three of the Fellows of Magdalen. C. C. J. 
W., after mentioning the persons present, 
writes : " The date was February 6, '90 : we 
did not break up till 11.30. Mr. Gladstone 
said that he recollected the younger Kean 
acting Henry V. in 1859, and that the 
lines — 

I thought upon each pair of English legs 
Did march three Frenchmen — 

were always received with much applause : 
' On the night, however, on which the news 
of Magenta (I think) arrived they were 
received in silence.' Mr. Gladstone gave 
this as an instance of the spontaneous good 
feeling of the audience, which did not let 
them boast over the French, when the French 
had been fighting gallantly and they them- 
selves were at home at ease. After breakfast 
25 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

we adjourned to the President's study. The 
talk turned at first upon the Homeric gods, 
was chiefly addressed to D. G. H., and, as 
was natural in view of D. G. H.'s recent 
production of the ' Devia Cypria,' Aphrodite 
was mentioned and her oriental character 
discussed. . . . Some of it was also on Greek 
topics of a more modern date ; Mr. Glad- 
stone said that his popularity in Greece was 
largely due to his name being declinable : 
TXaSo-Twv^ TXaScTTcovos, &c. I think this was 
to cap a story which J. T. told of a Greek 
who knew only two English words, London 
and Gladstone. Mr. G. also spoke of the 
Sultan and the Turks. He did not approve 
of the Greek claim to Thessaly. Of the 
genuine Turks he spoke with respect, but 
' the Sultan,' said he, ' is false as hell.' He 
said that the Sultan had once sent over an 
old Turkish Bey to treat confidentially with 
his, Mr, Gladstone's, Government ; they had 

liked him greatly and got on with him 
26 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

excellently ; he was an honest man ; but the 
Sultan sent to watch him another envoy, 
*who, I am sorry to say, was not a true 
man : it was doubtless represented to the 
Sultan by this person that the Bey got on 
too well with the English ministers, for he 
went back to Turkey and was never heard 
of again.' When at length Mr. Gladstone 
got up to go, the President presented to him 
more particularly those members of the com- 
pany to whom he had not talked ; to most 
of these he had something to say ; to J. S. 
he spoke of the big sums which he remem- 
bered being earned by operatic singers, par- 
ticularly by Patti. He had known my 
father, who was a friend of Sir Stephen 
Glynne, and had stayed at Hawarden ; to 
me he naturally recalled this." 

A. D. G. adds: "After eighteen years I 
have forgotten exactly who was present, but 
I remember that C. M. was introduced to 

Mr. Gladstone rather embarrassingly as ' Our 
27 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

philologist.' Our guest was very cheerful, 
thoroughly alert and vigorous — making little 
jokes at breakfast about having left Mrs. 
Gladstone behind because there were too 
many ladies in Oxford already, and full of 
conversation on a variety of subjects. He 
said something to everybody, and it was 
always meant to be something specially ap- 
propriate. Nothing came amiss to him, and 
even on rowing he gave the President of 
the O.U.B.C. several quite new facts about 
the history of that sport. Of course nobody 
dared to draw him on politics. But he 
happened to be talking about Jews and 
mentioned the fact that there were none or 
very few in Ireland ; somebody was rash 
enough to suggest that recent events were 
not very encouraging to capitalists in that 
country ; for a moment the speaker was 
conscious of being transfixed by a terrible 
eye; it was only for a moment, but one 

had the sense of potential annihilation. The 
28 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

little that Mr. Gladstone did say about 
current politics was rather surprising. He 
spoke with strong condemnation of schemes 
for disestablishment (of the Welsh Church, 
I think), and used the phrase, ' regrettable 
cupidity,' of the Russian ambition to possess 
Constantinople. This seemed hardly in 
character : I don't remember that he was 
speaking to Conservatives, and even if he 
had been, he was not one to make con- 
cessions to his audience ; but I believe that 
he was susceptible to the genius loci^ that 
Oxford made him a Tory again because he 
had been a Tory there once. We sat talking, 
or being talked to, in the President's study 
till nearly noon. I say ' being talked to ' be- 
cause really, as was natural, nobody said very 
much except the great man. Yet this was 
the surprising thing, that the impression left 
was not of a monologue at all ; rather we 
felt that we had had a conversation led and 

dominated by a master of the art of dialogue. 
29 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

One began to realise how much * personal 
magnetism ' and social skill had to do with 
the holding together of a miscellaneous 
political party in Parliament." 

T. H. W. adds : " Some of the party who 
had met Mr. Gladstone before, said that they 
had never known him so brilliant. He cer- 
tainly appeared to be in the best of health 
and spirits. A lady who was present, having 
begun the conversation by saying that she 
heard that Mrs. Gladstone was coming to 
Oxford, the great man replied, 'Yes, and 
I must tell you that it is entirely without 
my countenance. . . .* He then spoke of 
the College Chapel, which he had been at- 
tending frequently, and the talk came to 
turn on the point whether the choir was 
heard to better advantage when the Chapel 
was full or empty. Sir J. S. was appealed 
to. He said that Magdalen Chapel might 
be more resonant when comparatively empty, 

but that if a building were at all large, it 
30 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

was better that it should be full. Some one 
then asked Mr. Gladstone, ' Which is better 
for speaking in, a full room or an empty 
room ? ' I cut in" and said, ' You mustn't 
ask Mr. Gladstone that, he has had no ex- 
perience of an empty room.' This seemed 
to please him ; with a smile all over his face, 
and in quite an Odyssean manner, he replied, 
' I have had all experiences.' I then said, 
' We might perhaps go further and ask 
whether a little opposition is not a good 
thing for a speaker.' Mr. G. : ' Certainly, 
the worst thing in the world is a dead 
audience. City gatherings are bad, because 
as a rule there are a good many ladies 
present and they are not allowed by etiquette 
to demonstrate or express their feelings, con- 
sequently they are so much dead weight.' 
An audience of actors, he said, was the best 
he had ever had ; they appreciated points 
with so much rapidity. He then spoke of 
Bishop Christopher Wordsworth and his book 
31 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 I 

on Greece ; * it was a notable book ; he dis- \ 
covered the site of Dodona and gave his I 
reasons for the identification ; years after- j 
wards the Germans made the same discovery. 
His smaller book on Athens is the only book 
which handles topography with grace.' He 
then spoke of public schools : ' Harrow is 
wonderful as having been a local grammar 
school which has blossomed into the great 
institution it now is ; there are other examples 
of the same kind, such as Uppingham.' 
A. D. G. said, ' Yes, and Rugby.' Mr. G. : 
' Yes, but Rugby never got quite into the 
first rank. It was always dependent on its 
Headmaster. Old Hawtrey used to say 
that Eton was independent of its Head. 
Probably the same might be said of Win- 
chester. Eton and Winchester would go 
on whoever was Head ; they are national 
institutions.' Returning to the Wordsworths 
he quoted the Bishop of St. Andrews' Latin 
lines on his wife — 

32 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

I nimium dilecta, vocat Deus, i bona nostrae 
Pars animae ; maerens altera disce sequi. 

'But,' added Mr. Gladstone, 'the Bishop 
afterwards married again. . . . Bishop 
Wordsworth broke down in health as a 
young man ; he is now eighty-four ; it is 
often so. Look at Liddell ! When he was 
a young man he was condemned ; Acland 
took him to Madeira for several years ; he 
recovered his health, and has grown into 
the grand old man we all know.' By-and- 
by Mr. Gladstone gave us a most amusing 
account of how he had gone, as a young 
man, to a music hall. ' It was when I was 
less well known ; I dursn't do it now ; it 
was quite respectable, but oh ! so dull. By- 
and-by, looking round, I found that no one 
was drunk, but that everybody about me 
was quietly boozing, and I retired as being 
a very unprofitable attendant.' In the library 
to which we adjourned, he spoke mainly 
about Greece, ancient and modern. He 
33 c 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

thought that after the Crimean War a great 
Turk might have restored Turkey ; now 
she had sunk beyond recovery. He thought 
that Homer had intended to write, or rather 
sing, two more poems, on the wanderings 
of Menelaus and on the last days and 
death of Odysseus. He did not believe the 
existing poems were largely interpolated : 
' nowhere can you pick out five lines which 
have not the characteristic Homeric style ; 
Homeric atmosphere pervades the whole 
Homeric poems.' " 

D. G. H. says : " I recall that he arrived 
rather late . . . his conversation through- 
out was addressed to the company present. 
He spoke of having seen Routh in Con- 
vocation; he talked most of the events of 
his own youth, seeming to remember them 
much more clearly than those of his middle 
life. . . . When we passed into the library 
a semicircle was formed, with Mr. Glad- 
stone at one horn of it on the left and 
34 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

myself next to him. He was very deaf, 
and I had to repeat to him many things 
said by others in the company. He talked 
to me about the nearer East, of which he 
had heard that I had seen something, of 
his own mission to the Ionian Isles, of 
the present Sultan. He spoke hopefully 
of Greece, and asked if brigandage had 
ceased. When the circle broke up, I re- 
call that he spoke to E. of the quantity 
of port habitually consumed by his (E.'s) 
ancestor. Lord Eldon. To the president of 
the O.U.B.C. he commented on the respec- 
tive sizes of the heads of men in the Cam- 
bridge and Oxford boats. . . . When he left 
the house two females emerged stealthily 
from behind a chapel buttress and followed 
him to the Lodge, and up the High Street, 
I had to go up the street also, and I saw 
them following him past Queen's College, 
where all the cabmen on the stand lined 
up and touched or took off their hats to 
35 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

him. Mr. G. was in academical dress and 
carried a large gamp umbrella ; he walked 
very fast, with long strides, responding to 
all salutes." 



* 



Friday^ 31. — All his portraits make him 

too fierce. There is great mobility and 

play of face, as well as of gesture with 

the hands, which he is fond of bringing 

down plump on the table to emphasise a 

point (not good for our table, which is a 

very old, thin bit of the finest mahogany). 

Eyes grey -blue, and though occasionally 

they light up so much as to be describable 

as " fierce," in ordinary conversation they 

are essentially mild. On the only occasion 

on which I heard him in the House ten 

years ago he looked big (I suppose men 

do look big there), but really he is short 

of stature and slight.^ Both sight and hear- 

^ I take exception to the epithet " slight." 
— W. R. A. 

C. W. O. says : " My first impression of him 
36 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

ing are slightly affected, but he marches 
bravely ; simply lives in his cap and gown, 
and mislays it whenever he has to take it 
off.^ Likes to accept little attentions from 
Juniors, and accepts them very prettily. 

was that he was a much bigger man than I had 
expected." 

^ It was sometimes very difficult to induce Mr. 
Gladstone to divest himself of his gown, and I 
am sure that he regarded the less frequent use 
of academical dress as a sign of decadence in 
university life. On one night of his visit he went 
w^ith me to dine at the Club, a dining society 
of tw^elve persons then just completing the first 
century of its existence. The member who enter- 
tained the Club on that evening was Dr. Bellamy, 
who was then Vice-Chancellor. Mr. G. started 
with me in full academical dress. I remarked that 
we did not wear gowns at the Club dinner, and 
he replied that in the presence of the Vice-Chan- 
cellor he must wear his govi^n. I did not pursue 
the subject, and during the rest of our short drive 
we discussed, heaven knows why, the comparative 
efficiency of municipal government at Manchester 
and Liverpool. When we entered the drawing- 
37 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

I was not presented to him to-night, but 
he spoke to me accidentally on some point 
of College history. He has " le grand air 
bourbonien," and his manners are very per- 
fect. Quite without affectation, he has the 
views and habits of an earlier age. He 
spoke very prettily to H. W. B., who was 
too much struck with the suddenness of 
the address to converse with him, when 
Gladstone said, " We were at Eton together, 
were we not ? " (By the way, B. always 
used to say of his Eton days : " Yes, Glad- 
stone was a horrid boy, horrid boy, asked 
me to belong to a debating society once ! *') 

room at St. John's, Dr. Bellamy said at once, after 
the first greetings, " Mr. Gladstone, you must take 
off your gown." "But," said Mr. G., "in the 
presence of the Vice-Chancellor — " " Oh, no," 
said Dr. Bellamy, " we make no account of 
Vice-Chancellors in the Club. You must take 
off your gown." " Well," said Mr. Gladstone, 
sadly, " in this lawless assembly I suppose I must 
conform to its rules." — W. R. A. 
38 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

Gladstone has a strong Lancashire accent ; 
calls " prefer " " prefurr " ; " conform " 
almost became " confurrm," but not, you 
understand, the Scottish " r." Occasion- 
ally, as old people will, he elides an h ; 
'erb, 'armony came as a surprise to-night. 
I caught the following scraps of conversa- 
tion : " Yes, I did hear Lord John [Russell] 
tell the story of his being presented to 
Napoleon at Elba." 

" There have been no great musical com- 
posers for fifty years. Donizetti, Rossini, 
and Bellini are the last. ' La Donna e 
mobile ' is the last air that has been written. 
Women's voices are not what they were. 
Now there's L. T. : she has a nice voice, but 
absolutely no style." 

G. " I view with the greatest alarm the 
progress of Socialism at the present day." 

H. H. H. " Mr. G., it lies with you 
to give it a great impulse forward or 
backward." 

39 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

G. " Whatever influence I can use, Mr. 
H., will be used in the direction of stopping 
it. It will not be in my day, but it is 
alarming. It is the upper classes who are 
largely responsible for it." [Who's he 
thinking of,?] 

He ate everything. He drank, perfectly 
unconscious of what he was drinking, the 
first wine that came round to him. I thus 
noticed him drinking severally port, claret, 
which the *' Screw" [the Junior Fellow who 
decants the wine] in his agitation had by 
mistake poured into a port-decanter, and 
brown sherry. He talked incessantly from 
seven-thirty till ten- twenty. 



* * 
* 



" Mr. Gladstone," says W. R. A., " only 

fell back upon brown sherry because the 

Junior Fellow had so maltreated the port. 

I had not noticed this mishap, and recollect 

calling Mr. Gladstone's attention to the 

decanter out of which he was helping 
40 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

himself, as I thought he might have misread 
the labels. He replied that our port was 
excellent, but that his doctor had enjoined 
upon him the drinking of a drier wine. I 
did not discover till later the strange com- 
bination of flavours which had been presented 
to him in the guise of port." 

With regard to Socialism T. R. notes that 
he said further : " For me Socialism has no 
attractions : nothing but disappointment 
awaits the working classes if they yield to 
the exaggerated anticipations which are held 
out to them by the Labour party." 

H. H. H. adds : " He also expressed 
himself very positively on the subject of 
the greater class selfishness of the upper 
classes compared with the lower. I asked 
him whether Christianity was, in his opinion, 
as great a force in English politics now as it 
was fifty years ago. He said, in reply, that 
he thought it was greater, though the 
manner of its expression had changed, ' a 
41 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

change which I, as a denominationalist and 

a dogmatist, cannot wholly approve.' He 

said that an indication of improvement was 

the better conduct of members at prayers. 

This was not the only occasion on which he 

described himself as ' a denominationalist 

and a dogmatist.* When some one ' drew ' 

him on the question of Church schools, it 

was, he told us, in this dual capacity that 

he ' regarded the Board School as a most 

unsatisfactory solution of the problem of 

popular education.' " T. R. adds again : 

" Democracy indeed he seemed to accept, 

but he thought a wide franchise was not 

an advantage to the cause of reform. He 

tried to show that the real reforms of 1830— 

1880 would all have been carried by the 

unreformed House of Commons. This, I 

believe, was a favourite theme with him." 

To this A. H. H. : "I remember his rather 

staggering me by observing that the Duke 

of Wellington was quite right when he said 
42 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

in 1830 that the Constitution was incapable 
of improvement, and by his defending the 
saying on the ground that the control which 
the House of Lords exercised by means of 
the pocket boroughs over the House of 
Commons, established an ideal as well as 
a real equilibrium between the component 
parts of Parliament. He went on to say 
that the Reform Bill of 1832 destroyed 
this equilibrium, and that thenceforward the 
Constitution was logically bound to develop 
on purely democratic lines, a result which 
he seemed to regard as a doubtful blessing." 
He also told C. G. L. outright that " in 
point of ability and efficiency he thought 
the country had never been better governed 
than in the period preceding the first Reform 
Bill." 

We made at All Souls an exception in 
Mr. Gladstone's favour. No Fellow in my 
recollection ever spoke to another, however 
43 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

much his senior, as " Mr.," but instinctively 
every one called the honorary Fellow, " Mr. 
Gladstone." 

On this point C. G. L. remarks : " It fell 
to me on the first morning to have to 
address some formal question to him, and 
I addressed him of course as ' Mr. Glad- 
stone.' He smiled and said, 'Surely it 
ought to be " Gladstone " here ' (we were 
in the Common Room), But of course 
we could not take him at his word ; do you 
think any one ever addressed the Great 
Commoner as ' Pitt ' ,? " 



•X- * 

* 



Saturday^ February i. — "There is a beard 
upon the chin of man which, pointed at 
the tip, leads on to fortune." At breakfast 
this morning I found H. H. H., A. C. H., 
J. S. G. P., A. H. H., C. W. O., C. H. R., 
and Mr. Gladstone. The Old Man rose and 
bowed as I came in and of course I bowed 
back. I took the vacant seat right opposite 
44 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

him, and we had much delightful conversa- 
tion which I will endeavour to put down. 
But what was my amazement, when I got 
up to get my bacon and coffee from the 
fire, when he said, " I want a word with 
you afterwards, if it is not trespassing too 
much on your valuable time." 

" My time has no value, Mr. Gladstone 
[I had three pupils waiting for me at lo, 
II and 12 respectively — poor beasts], but 
if it were much more valuable than it is it 
would be wholly at your service." [Blue 
funk on part of F. for the rest of breakfast.] 

H. H. H. said : " Half the people in 
crowded towns are unbaptized." 

G. " Not so in Catholic countries. A 
curate of ours went from Hawarden to 
a populous place in Nottinghamshire and 
found he had to baptize 1600 people in a 
year ; as for those of confirmation age and 
above it, he thought it best not to ask 
them whether they had been baptized. No, 
45 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

it wasn't Nottingham itself. I can't recall 
the name of the town, my memory is not 
what it was [then it must have been pro- 
digious — it's big enough now, though very 
erratic and capricious] ; but it was a great 
scandal to the great landowner ^ of the place. 
Who was he .? I can't tell you ; no, not the 
Newcastle family, but I can't recall who." 

Some one asked him if there were fees 
for baptism. He didn't seem to know. 
Indignant chorus from H. H. H. and 
A. C. H. : " No ! " 

^ This reference to the "great landowner" 
illustrates a point in Mr. Gladstone's view of 
English life which Mr. Morley has admirably 
brought out in his " Life." The world was often 
to him the pre-Reform Bill world, in which the 
"great landowner" would naturally look after 
both the souls and bodies of his tenants. Any- 
thing more out of touch with the world of 1890 
than the notion that an owner of property in a 
large town would be supposed to know if its 
inhabitants were baptized or not can hardly be 
imagined. 

46 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

G. " But I think in Catholic countries all 
the sacraments are charged for." 

F. told J. D.'s story of the couple who 
lived for two months by getting their baby 
baptized in a fresh parish each day and 
getting a dinner out of the Vicar for their 
piety. G. laughed heartily at it. 

A. C. H. " Do you like the addition to 
our reredos, Mr. G. .? " 

G. " I hardly noticed it, but I will look." 
A. C. H. "We shall look for your 

opinion on it. There is great division of 
opinion on it in College." [C. W. O. 
groaned.] 

C. H. R. " You know the heads of the 
statues in the reredos were copied from the 
heads of Fellows of the College living when 
it was put up ? " 

G. "Yes ... it must have cost Bathurst 
a great deal of money." 

A. C. H. "More than he intended, I 

believe." 

47 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

G. " The sculptor, too, I've heard, was a 
man to make a good thing out of it. What 
was his name again .? " 

A. C. H. " Geflowski." 

G. " Ah, yes, he was a shrewd man. But 
[to C. W. O.] you have been at Florence 
lately, and you've seen the new facciata of 
the Duomo .f* My friend Mr. Leader is San 
Callisto there." [Meaning that the statue 
of San Callisto is copied from Mr. L.'s 
head.] 

C. W. O. " Oh, yes, the man who has just 
written the life of Sir John Hawkwood." 

G. " It was, I believe, a joint composition. 
Marino (.'') got a lot of documents together 
for it." 

Some one started the question whether 

Warden and Fellows could still be buried in 

College Chapels. A. C. H. of course knew 

the law: "The Warden always; Fellows if 

they die in College." Then some one asked 

me if it was true that leave had been refused 
48 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

to bury the late President of Magdalen in 
the Chapel. (I did not know.) 

G. " Leave ? From whom .? " 

A. C. H. " From the Home Secretary. I 
forget who he was at the time." 

G. " Ah yes, of course I remember Palmer- 
ston refusing leave for a Canon of West- 
minster to be buried in the Abbey, which 
seems hard considering what a lot of people 
they bury there who have no connection 
with it." 

F. "They still bury in the cloisters at 
Salisbury ; do they bury in cloisters at 
Eton .'' Would a Provost have the right 
to be buried there if he had died in 
College.?" 

G. " I don't know. Where was the late 
Provost buried ? " 

F. "Either in Somersetshire, or in the 
Churchyard of Eton College Chapel." ^ 

G. " The Chapel was the parish church 

^ See below, p. 8i. 

49 D 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

of Eton, of course." [He remembers much 
more about Eton than about Oxford.] 

The conversation drifted back to fees for 
sacraments, and A, C. H. said : " Fees on 
marriage are irrecoverable by law. I am 
bound to marry two people properly banned 
and licensed, but have no means of get- \ 
ting the fee unless they please to give < 
it me." I 

G. " It's the same with doctors." [Wrong, ' 

Mr. G. ; new Act, perhaps you passed it.] \ 

" Now my doctor, Sir Andrew Clark, he's a 5 

very clever man and a very hard-working j 

man. Eight hours a day ? Sir, he works \ 

more like sixteen. He often gets no fees, 

though he has made a fortune larger than 

any doctor ever made. People send for him 

long distances into the country, and then i 

give him nothing or the ordinary fee. He i 

takes what he can get. He is utterly un- j 

mercenary. But you would be surprised to < 

hear that no less a person than Dr. Hawtrey j 
50 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

told me that I would never believe it, if he 
were to give me the names of people who 
never paid their sons' bills." 

F. " It was the same at Westminster. I 
had a most interesting document in my hands 
the other day — a manuscript diary and ac- 
count book of Dr. Busby, and it contains 
endless entries, against the highest names, of 
bills unpaid." 

G. "Ah, that's very interesting. Now 
why doesn't some one write a life of Dr. 
Busby ? that would be a volume of great 
interest. Busby was the founder of the 
Public School system of England, and the 
Public School system is the greatest thing in 
England, not even excepting the House of 
Commons. Those two : the Public Schools 
and the House of Commons ! " (slapping his 
hand thrice on the table). " Busby was a 
wonderful man : if I am not mistaken, he 
was made Headmaster under Charles I. and 
continued to be so until William III." 

51 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

H. H. H. (laughing). " He must have 
been a pretty fair time-server then." 

G. " No, and this is the point at which I 
am aiming — no one ever called him a time- 
server : he made the times serve him. Well 
now, his life must be written." 

F. " Dr. Rutherford could do it very 
v/ell ; he is much interested : he wanted the 
Oxford Historical Society to publish this 
Diary, but, as it contained no reference to 
Oxford, we were obliged to decline." 

A. C. H. then led the conversation to 
Christ's Hospital and the precarious position 
of its endowments, and asked whether the 
scheme was completed. Some one told a 
story of how he had been there lately, and 
had had a conversation with the old porter, 
who declared he wasn't going to move what- 
ever the buildings did. G. laughed heartily, 
and asked what they were going to get for 
the site. 

A. C. H. ";^650,ooo I was told." 
52 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

G. " What does it cover ? " 

A. C. H. *' Five and a half acres, I 
believe." 

G. " It is to the south of Holborn, is 
it not .? " 

A. C. H. " No, to the north." 

Then G. got boggled in his geography 
about the position of St. Bartholomew's, 
Newgate, &c. C. W. O. whispered : " He 
likes maps, draw it for him." F. drew 
and handed it over to him. Then he 
asked where St. Martin's - le - Grand was. 
He has quite forgotten his city, if indeed 
he ever knew it. Anyhow, he found H.'s 
figures far too low, and the conversation 
turned on the value of city sites. 

G. "I remember a firm — a very good 
firm, who had two small rooms in Token- 
house Yard, and their rent was ^300. 
They began to expect it to be raised, per- 
haps to ^400 or even ;^5oo. So when 
the landlord next called they were very 
53 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

polite, as he was to them, and he said 
they were such excellent tenants he would 
let them stop on at ^looo. They were 
staggered, but accepted and made a very 
good thing out of it afterwards." 

He then quoted several instances of 
enormous rents which I can't recollect. 
H. H. H. asked him : " Do you expect 
London to go on growing ? " 

G. *' Yes, continually. In another cen- 
tury London will have ten millions of 
people." 

H. H. H. " But will not the decay of 
the docks and all the industries depending 
on them affect London very much ? " 

G. " We can't tell yet. London is not 
like the great towns of the North, where 
there are a few great industries liable to 
sudden upset. Why do we never hear 
of great distress at Birmingham .? Simply 
because its industries are so subdivided. 
Small industries are preferable to great 
54 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

ones for the prosperity of a town. Now 
everything is made at Birmingham ; all the 
sham oriental curiosities you buy as you 
jump ashore through the surf at Madras 
[Why Madras .? he's never been in India, 
has he ^^ are made there. But the whole 
system of Lancashire industries will be 
upset by the Manchester Ship Canal. 
That will cause a stupendous industrial 
revolution." 

C. W. O. "Will Liverpool suffer.? " 
G. evaded the question, but spoke of 
the difficulties of the bar at Liverpool, and 
said that the Manchester Canal was likely 
to lead to the opening of another mouth 
of the Mersey. 

O. " Above or below Liverpool ? " 
G. " They mean to cut through the 
narrow neck of the Cheshire peninsula." 

H. H. H. " But don't you remember 
that at the time of the war scare the 
Liverpool bar was supposed to be a great 
55 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

protection — could easily be rendered im- 
passable ? " 

I forget how the conversation got back 
to London, but something led Mr. Glad- 
stone to say, with great emphasis : " Now 
that those infamous coal dues are taken 
off. . . ." He didn't exactly know whether 
they were ofF or only to come off, but 
C. H. R. supplied the information and 
recounted how, when he was City Remem- 
brancer, a petition was got up against these 
dues, and how the City got up sham and 
bogus meetings, " as they know how to 
do," in defence of the dues. 

G. (interrupting and with humour) : 
*' Nowhere is the art " [of getting up sham 
meetings, he meant] "better understood." 
[Much laughter, which delighted him.] 
" But, do you know, I think Randolph 
Churchill's speech had a great effect in 
getting those dues abolished. Most re- 
markable man is Randolph Churchill, He 
5^ 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

went to that office [Exchequer] knowing 
nothing of figures, but having a natural 
capacity for the grasp of them, and I can 
tell you he impressed the Treasury and 
Revenue men very greatly. . . ." 

One by one during breakfast people had 
dropped in and out, and of course many 
people took a part in the conversation, and 
much was said which I cannot now recall ; 
but the protagonists were always H. H. H., 
C. W. O., and A. C. H. A. H. H., who 
is of course by far our best talker and 
likely to know more de -par le monde -poli- 
tique than any of us, hardly said a word. 
Sometimes there was a little court of 
people half round and half behind Mr. G., 
who pushed his chair a little way back ; 
and he had the prettiest way of half turn- 
ing round to people and changing the 
address of his conversation. There was 
only one old Westminster boy present, 
F. W. B,, and I think that, as usual, he 
57 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

had got up late, for he came in after the 
episode about Busby ; but some one men- 
tioned him as a Westminster to Mr. Glad- 
stone, who forthwith asked him a string 
of questions about the school, and said " in 
the seventeenth century it was much the 
greatest school in England," and he reeled 
off the names of some of its greatest sons : 
" Eton," he said, " only took the lead 
from the time of the Walpole family." 

The butler poured out Mr. Gladstone's 
tea for him, and to everything that was 
handed him he always said, " Oh, thank 
you, thank you." A radiant smile mantled 
on the butler's solemn face, and he looked 
a " nunc dimittis." You know that till 
'86 he was a great admirer and an ardent 
politician. He even christened his son 
"Ewart" after the name of his hero. 

Mr. G. half looked round at the butler 

who was handing him butter, when he 

said, " the pats of butter are of the same 
58 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

size as they were in my undergraduate 
days, and so are the pieces of fish ! " Yet 
he could be sharp, too. He quite politely 
but firmly shut up one of us, who, with 
singular want of tact, tried to draw him 
about the reasons of the unpopularity of 
the London County Council. " Indeed ; 
he had not heard of that — was not much 
in the way of hearing current gossip." 



* -it 
* 



A similar instance has been recalled to my 
memory by C. G. L. " One evening some 
of the Junior Fellows, perhaps wickedly, 
tried to test the astuteness of the ' old 
parliamentary hand.' It was well known 
that Mr. Gladstone had not been altogether 
successful on his mission to the Ionian 
Islands in 1859; so X. started some subject 
connected with the Mediterranean, and 
gradually drew the talk nearer to the Ionian 
Islands. But long before we reached them 
something seemed to put the old gentleman 
59 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

on his guard ; there was a momentary and 
very characteristic lifting of that well- 
known right eyebrow, and then, with per- 
fect courtesy, he rose saying, ' And now I 
think it would be very pleasant to see the 
moonlight in the quadrangle.' " 

" I could add another," writes W. R. A. 
" One evening in Common Room his neigh- 
bour was getting on to some political subject 
— I think it must have been Liberalism in 
Wales — and he turned it off by a story about 
Bethell which I have never heard elsewhere. 
Bethell was conducting a case before Lord 
Justice Knight Bruce, whom he did not love 
and who did not love him. Knight Bruce 
was of Welsh extraction, and disliked any 
allusion to it ; he was also a scholar, and fond 
of quoting classical authors. Knight Bruce 
interrupted the argument with a classical 
quotation. Bethell's opponent was at that 
moment in conversation with his junior, 

and becoming aware that the Lord Justice 
60 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

had said something, looked up and said, 
' I did not catch his Lordship's remark.' 
* Neither did I,' said Bethell, ' it was an 
observation couched, I believe, in the Welsh 
language.' " 

Letter of Feb. i {continued) 

N.B. — Mr, G.'s Lancashire accent grows 
on one : he almost says " gyarden " for 
garden, and does say " propourrtion." At 
last about 9.55 (this had lasted some fifty- 
five minutes) there were only two people 
left beside him and me ; and I, thinking 
he might have forgotten, got up and bowed, 
intending to slip away ; but he was up 
like a shot, and said, " Yes, yes, come 
along, I won't keep you long ; " but he 
didn't get up, so I stood by the fire 
through a short fit of silence. At last 
he moved, and I followed him ; he had 
forgotten his cap and gown, which I 

fetched, and he said : " This is my own 
61 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

gown but a borrowed cap, and, as you see, 
it doesn't fit — my head is a difficult one 
to fit " (laughing). He led the way to 
his rooms.^ F. said : " You begin to know 
your way about College, Mr. Glad- 
stone." 

G. "Yes, but when I was last here my 
base of operations was the Warden's house, 
and that was in a different part of the 
College." 

^ The situation of Mr. Gladstone's rooms is a 
matter of historical importance. They were on 
the second floor of the staircase immediately be- 
yond the buttery, with windows looking over the 
large quadrangle on the one side, and over the 
Coffee Room Garden, towards Queen's^ on the 
other.— W. R. A. 

C. W. O., whose rooms were immediately be- 
neath Mr. Gladstone's, says that he has " a most 
vivid memory of the noise of feet up and down 
the staircase all day long, as deputation after de- 
putation, and individual after individual climbed 
to the second floor to pay its respects to our 
visitor." 

62 



VIEW OF ROOMS AT ALL SOULS COLLEGE, OXFORD, 
OCCUPIED BY MR. GLADSTONE 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

F. "I hope you are comfortable — they're 
very nice rooms you've got." 

G. " Charming, everything I could wish." 
(He then led me to the table, which was 
piled up with letters, and, taking one up, 
gave it to me.) " This is from young 
Peel (the President of the Union Debating 
Society), and you see how it concerns you." 
I saw that it didn't concern me in the 
least, and was beginning to wonder if I 
should call for help. I supposed at first 
he had mistaken me for some secretary to 
the Union (the letter was one inviting him 
to make a speech at the Union), when 
he suddenly began : " Now concerning our 
conversation of last night, I thought better 
to ask your advice in the matter. . . ." 

F. "I see, Mr. Gladstone, you have 
made a complete mistake, I hadn't the 
honour of being presented to you last 
night." 

G. *' I beg a thousand pardons. I took 

63 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

you for Mr. Pelham" [who had sat next 
him in the Common Room last night]. -"^ 

F. " The mistake has been a most happy 
one for me. Pelham has often teased me 
about my growing a beard in order to try 
and look like him ; and it's a great com- 
pliment too, for he's one of the handsomest 
men in Oxford." 

G. " My dear fellow, it was the beard ! 
My eyesight is not what it was — you must 
forgive an old man — nor my hearing either." 

F. " But you'll let me take a message 
to Pelham for you now. I'll go directly, 
and I'm sure he'll come.'* 

G. *' No, no, don't trouble, do sit down. 

Now I remember a man in the House of 

Commons when I was young whom we 

knew as ' the man with the beard.' Nobody 

1 Henry Pelham was then Camden Professor of 
Ancient History and a leading University Liberal. 
He was the guest of the Warden at dinner, and 
Mr. Gladstone and he got on extremely well 
together. Multis ilk bonis flehil'is . . . 1907. 
64 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

wore beards then, and that was the origin 
of my mistake," [And he laughed — a deep 
gurgling sort of chuckle.] " But what I 
wanted was this. Mr. Pelham and I were 
talking last night about Egyptology and 
Assyriology and their connection with 
Homer." [My stars ! thinks I, I've heard 
he does this kind of thing by the hour, 
and my Greek is devilish rusty.] " Now 
that, you know, is a subject in which I 
am much interested, and I have lately de- 
voted much time to investigating the effect 
of the Assyrian and Egyptian myths on 
Homer's phraseology. And I thought per- 
haps, if, instead of speaking at the Union, 
I were to give the young men there a 
sort of informal lecture " — [he's eighty- 
one, ye gods] — *' a friendly talk, in fact, 
on the subject, it might be of interest to 
them. But Pelham said he thought (not 
apropos of this proposal, for I hadn't laid 

it before him) that the subject was hardly 
65 E 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

yet in sufficiently exact condition to lay 

before them " [quite right, Pelham] " as a 

regular part of their curriculum, and I 

wanted to consult him as to whether there 

would be any harm in my acting as I now 

propose to act." ^ 

^ This lecture at the Union was a strange per- 
formance. He told me a day or two before that 
he had been in some difficulty about a subject. I 
suggested that any personal recollections, either of 
Oxford in his undergraduate days or of the House 
of Commons when he first entered it, would be 
of immense interest. He said no, there were 
reasons against either of these, but that he had 
hit on a subject which he thought was sure to be 
acceptable. It was the "connection of Homeric 
with modern Assyriological studies." I wondered, 
and was silent ; so did the audience wonder, while 
it was being delivered — wonder what it was all 
about. But when, at the close of the address, a 
vote of thanks to him was proposed, then we got 
the real thing to which we had been looking 
forward, ten minutes of genuine oratory, in which 
he told us how pleased he was to come back to 
the Union, to find that the President was the 
grandson of his old leader, Sir Robert Peel, and 
66 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

F. " I should think it would not in the 
least affect his standpoint, which was, I 
understand, confined to the question of the 
regular teaching at Oxford. All he meant 
was it was too early for it to come in as a 
subject in ' the Schools.' " 

G. "Yes, I'm sure he'll agree it would do 
no harm. But, do you know, I've discovered 
the strangest things about it. Now, there's 
that epithet TruXajOTJ??, the ' gate - shutter,' 
applied to Aidoneus " [he pronounces Greek 
in a foreign way that I never heard before, 
and, as I said, my Greek is rusty]. " Liddell 
and Scott give no meaning for it -^ (and I'm 

to live again, even for a short time, in Oxford, 
in a place of which " he loved every stone in the 
walls."— W. R. A. 

^ Liddell and Scott do give the meaning, and 
the one Mr. Gladstone mentioned. Moreover, it 
is not to ^AiSoyvevf; but to ^AtSrj'i, of which ^AlScovev^ 
is only a lengthened form, that the epithet applies 
in the three passages where it occurs in Homer. 
(Iliad, viii. 367, xiii. 415 ; Odyssey, xi. 277.) 
67 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

going to talk to Liddell about that), but 
why should he be called the gate-shutter? 
Persephone was the ruler of the infernal 
regions, and Aidoneus had nothing to say 
to it. . . . But I find in the series of myths 
given in [somebody or other's] collection of 
Assyrian antiquities, that there were seven 
gates of those regions, and that when Ash- 
taroth, being a goddess, went thither on her 
own concerns she had to pass these gates, 
and, though she had some difficulty in get- 
ting in, she had none in getting back — 
whereas with mortals the difficulty was to 
get back. It's curious, very curious." \_N.B. 
— I failed to see how it bore on 'Al'Swvevs 
TrvXdprrjg^ but that was probably my igno- 
rance.] "And again there's that number 
seven. There was a system of 'ETrra-ism 
in the ancient world — the seven gates of 
Thebes, for instance. And in the Assyrian 
version of the Deluge there are seven days 
of storm and one day of calm ; which again 
68 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

is affiliated to the seven days of creation." [I 
have always heard that "mystic numbers" 
are one of the last infirmities of noble 
minds,] " Yes, Homer's epithets are very 
curious. They haven't been half enough 
studied, and they all have a meaning, and 
many of them a mythologic meaning. Now 
again of the numbers. Why should He- 
phaestus make twenty seats for the Olympian 
Gods .? ^ There were not twenty gods, or 
rather far more. But Thetis finds him 
making twenty. Now Rawlinson says that 
this number twenty was the mystic number 
of the Assyrians. . . ." 

All this was poured out without my 
having a chance of getting a word except 
Yes and No, and other respectful expres- 
sions of astonishment. How long he would 
have gone on I can't say, but it had already 
lasted half-an-hour when the porter entered 
with a card from Sir Henry Acland, who 

1 Iliad, xviii. 373. 
69 



Mk. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

was below. So I rose and said I would go 
at once to Pelham, and that I was quite sure 
that Pelham would approve of anything he, 
Mr. Gladstone, thought fit to do about his 
lecture. He again begged forgiveness for 
the mistake, and I assured him that it had 
afforded me the greatest delight ; he said we 
should meet again at dinner. And I went 
off to tell Pelham, who immediately said he 
should go and get shaved. 

Sunday mornings February 2. — I'm afraid 
Vol. III. won't be as interesting as Vols. I. 
and II., for the editor is tired. Last night 
at dinner I sat about three places off him, 
and the conversation was chiefly carried on 
with W. R. A., C. W. B., and C. C, 
C. H. R. hovering about the fringe 
of it. 

G. "Tennyson was the greatest poet of 
the century. Swinburne, yes, great, but 
rather same." W. R. A. depreciated Swin- 
burne. G. to a certain extent stood up for 
70 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

him. G. also spoke of the extraordinary 
sale of Lewis Morris's works : all depreciated 
him. 

W. R. A. " Have you read Bryce's book 
on America .? '* 

G. "Not all of it. I can't say all, but 
enough to see what a valuable and laborious 
book it is. The Americans are astonished 
at it. The development of millionaires in 
America is extraordinary. Now there's Car- 
negie — Carnegie began at four shillings a 
week and is making ^^ 3 60,000 a year. He 
wrote a book about it, which I did my best 
to have disseminated in England, but with- 
out success ; but I got him to write an article 

in the Magazine, which I regard as 

most remarkable. He there argues for the 
duty of making great fortunes, and enume- 
rates three ways of spending them. Two 
are bad — one is good. The bad ones — mind 
I don't go with him here — not in the first 

one — not for a moment — are (i) bequeath- 
71 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

ing it to your wife and children ; (2) 
bequeathing it to anything else — in fact, 
to charitable institutions. There I agree 
WITH HIM, EVERY WORD " (slapping his hand 
hard on the table). " The good one is (3) 
giving it away in your lifetime. He's always 
giving away, in England as well as in America, 
giving j£ 5 0,000 to a public library in America 
every now and then. Extraordinary thing 
the number of public libraries in America ; 
they say there are over two thousand of 
them ; there are no circulating libraries there. 
When the Royal College of Music wanted 
money, and was begging twenty pounds here 
and fifty pounds there with great difficulty, 
and the Princess of Wales was trying every- 
where for money for it, my daughter wrote 
to Carnegie and he sent her a cheque for 
;^iooo, and the Princess was wild with de- 
light. Now Quaritch deals enormously 
with America — it's the Americans who give 

the long prices for early editions, so he tells 
72 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

me. Does your library deal much with 
Quaritch .? No ? With whom then ? " 
W. R. A. " With various booksellers." 
G. " The rage for early editions is 
wonderful. Now, I had a little book, a 
first edition of Alastor, and some one sug- 
gested to me that it was valuable, and I took 
it to Sotheran or Westell, I forget which, 
who sent it to auction, and, after deducting 
the liberal commissions charged, I got a 
cheque for ;^8 or ^^9. Ah ! but I burned 
my fingers the other day : I bought a little 
book. Sterling's Poems, for two guineas, and 
met a friend afterwards who had got an 
equally good copy for 12s.'* 



* 



The storage of books was a favourite 
theme with Mr. Gladstone. C. G. L, re- 
members how he launched out on this 
theme one evening in the Common Room, 
and illustrated his scheme of bookshelves by 
an elaborate use of knives, forks, glasses, and 
73 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

decanters. In the Library, says C. W. O., 
the thing that interested him most was the 
collection of sixteenth-century Bibles. 

Letter of Feb. 2 (^continued) 

The conversation slipped on to Lord 
Houghton, and he told a story of Hough- 
ton's extraordinary love of paradox, which 
he wished kept private, and another which 
he didn't wish kept private : " It was one 
day at breakfast at Milman's (Macaulay 
was there), and Houghton said that he 
thought any author was entitled to perfectly 
indefeasible copyright for ever and ever 
in any book ; and in the next breath he 
declared that any person ought to be at 
perfect liberty to quote, extract, hash up, 
detach, pillage any piece out of any book 
he liked. And he maintained the two 
with perfect seriousness as both true." 

We came back to Carnegie somehow or 
other. 

74 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

G. "I dined with him not long ago at 
the Hotel Metropole, but no pomposity, 
all very simple and nice. Yes, but a mere 
leveller, a mere leveller in politics ; quite 
seriously, I dislike his politics. He has 
been taken up by some one whom I won't 
mention in the political world, who has 
made some use of him and floated a news- 
paper. No, I never see that sort of 
newspaper." 

The conversation turned on a then lead- 
ing Radical politician and journalist, and 
W. R. A. boldly said that he mistrusted 
the man. C. H. R. spoke of the man's 
trying to make himself out worse than he 
is, and ascribing to himself, in the smoking- 
room of his club, all the vices under heaven. 

G. was guarded, and spoke of him as 
"an able man, a man of whom he knew 
little," &c. 

Much that I didn't catch ; then 

W. R. A. "Yes, I put Boswell at the 
75 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

very head. The four best biographies ever 
written are Boswell [something inaudible], 
Morley's 'Life of Cobden,' and Southey's 
' Life of Wesley.' " ' 

G. " Ah ! you're right, but not about 
Morley's 'Cobden.' I don't like it. I 
have the highest opinion of Morley. But 
I knew Cobden intimately, and he was a 
most remarkable man. The way that man 
worshipped Peel ! The way he stuck by 
Peel and surrendered his own judgment 
to him. But the fact is that he had the 
most generous mind and one of the most 
sensitive. I remember Palmerston wound- 

^ I do not think that I was so dogmatic. I said 
that, if I had to name the four best biographers, 
I should name Boswell, a long way ahead, then 
Southey's « Life of Wesley," Trevelyan's « Mac- 
aulay," and Morley's " Cobden." If I recollect 
rightly, Mr. Gladstone accepted the first two 
readily, thought there was much to be said about 
the third, but that I was wrong about the fourth. 
— W. R. A. 

76 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

ing him very much, quite unintentionally ; 
Palmerston said lots of things which he did 
not mean, and never meant to wound any- 
body. But Cobden had said something in 
his speech which reflected on the conduct 
of foreign affairs, and Palmerston in reply 
applied to him the line * ne sutor ultra 
crepidam.' Cobden was terribly hurt. Not 
an orator like Bright, but such a noble 
character, so simple and so strong.'* 

At coffee time I took an opportunity of 
asking Mr. Gladstone whether he had seen 
Pelham ; he said, " Yes, he came yesterday 
morning soon after you left : " and then 
laughed immensely over his mistake again. 
Then he bade me sit down by him, and still, 
I suppose, under some vague idea that, if 
not Pelham, I was his shadow, or at least 
an ancient historian,^ he began to speak of 

^ T. R. illustrates this when he says : "Mr. 
Gladstone always seemed to be more interested in 
subjects than in persons ; he did not readily find 
77 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

the conditions of the study of ancient history. 
Then my long walks with Pelham in Nor- 
folk five years ago stood me in good stead. 
At first, like the Russians at ZorndorfF, I 
'* stood still to be sabred like oxen, yea like 
sacks of meal " (see Carlyle's " Frederick ") ; 
gradually I began to find my tongue. 

out what kind of man he was talking to, and was 
often oddly forgetful of what a man in his position 
is usually careful to remember." 

C. W. O. adds another illustration of this : 
" Mr. Gladstone remarked that we should consider 
it strange to be told that Cardinal Newman was 
unacquainted with the works of Dante ; ' the 
proof of it which I can give is this,' said he ; 
*the last time that I saw my old friend at the 
Oratory, I took the opportunity of telling him 
that I considered his " Dream of Gerontius " the 
most striking glimpse of the other world that 
had been conceived since the " Paradiso " : I was 
proceeding to enlarge upon this theme when he 
abruptly changed the topic of conversation, from 
which I could only conclude that he knew nothing 
of Dante.' That Newman had a modest desire 
not to talk about his own works had evidently not 
struck his interlocutor as likely." 
78 



Mr, Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

G. "And Rawlinson's lectures were not 
much attended ? " 

F. " No, I believe not ; indeed I think he 
did not lecture much latterly." 

G. " Why did he resign ? " 

F. " I think because he was made a Canon 
of Canterbury." 

G. " No, no, he has been a Canon of 
Canterbury for years" [poking his finger 
at F.]. 

F. " Of course, I beg pardon, it was 
because he got a City living and had to 
resign one of the three preferments, and 
chose the professorship." 

G. " Yes, yes, that was it. But he is an 
authority, is he not ? I mean his books ^ " 

F. " Yes, I believe great, especially on 
Phoenicia, though I saw a very unfavour- 
able review of one of his last works in the 
Spectator not long ago." 

G. " He and his brother Sir Henry 
Rawlinson led the way to the discoveries of 

79 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

the most ancient histories of the East. I 
fancy he utilised his brother's knowledge 
largely." 

F. " Mr. Sayce is the great authority on 
these things now. I don't know how far 
he has upset Rawlinson." 

G. "But I am thinking of thirty years 
ago. Sayce is quite young. Pelham is 
great on Greek History, isn't he .? " 

F. " Greater on Roman. You know he 
is a favourite disciple of Mommsen. When 
Mommsen was last over here he stayed with 
Pelham, who is following his plan of teach- 
ing. He wants to make a new Britannia 
Romana on Camden's model. I believe he 
has got a great work on the stocks." 

G. " But how is that not to clash with 

Merivale ? I thought Merivale was the 

standard work." [F. don't know much 

Roman History, but he knows better than 

that — Merivale is exploded. F. didn't know 

what to say, wriggled and twisted, with the 
80 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

eagle's blue-grey eyes glaring at him about 
eight inches off his own — looked up to 
W. R. A. for help, but W. R. A., who 
was standing just above us, either heard not 
or wouldn't hear.] 

F. " I am afraid I'm not competent to 
say, Mr. Gladstone. I fancy Pelham will 
be able to fill up some lacunae in Merivale, 
especially in the later period." 

Somehow we got back to some of our 
breakfast subjects and back to Eton, as he 
so often does. F. said : " We might refer 
the question of where a Provost is buried 
to W. R. A., he is on the Governing Body." 
W. R. A. said : " Provost Hawtrey was 
buried in the Chapel. I was at his funeral 
when I was a boy. The late Provost was 
buried in the cemetery on the Eton Wick 
Road. I attended his funeral, as a member 
of the Eton Governing Body, in 1884." 

G. " Headmasters are appointed very 
young nowadays." 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

W. R. A. " Yes, when I was on the 
Governing Body of Dulwich several can- 
didates were rejected because they were over 
forty." G. seemed quite astonished at this, 
and said, " But surely none was ever ap- 
pointed under thirty." 

Chorus. " Montagu Butler, Welldon, 
Rutherford." 

G. "Ah!" [It would require black letter 
to give an idea of the depth and richness of 
his "Ah!"] 

Chorus mixed up with itself again, and 
left G., W. R. A., and F. ; and F. said to 
W. R. A. : '* I remember when Warre was 
appointed to Eton some people were afraid 
he would be cut out by a younger man." 
W., knowing whom I meant, smiled. 

G. " Warre has been very successful, has 
he not.? I hear the school is 1050 in 
number." 

W. R. A. "No, Mr. Gladstone, it has 

never quite touched a thousand. In 1877 
82 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

it was within a few of that number — then 
came agricultural depression and the number 
fell off: now again it is at its highest." 

G. approved warmly of F.'s great enthu- 
siasm for Warre. W. R. A. led the con- 
versation to some question of finance, which 
led G. to say : " The man who knew least 
about finance, who was ever at the head of 
the Treasury, was the first Lord Ripon," 

W. R. A. " Prosperity Robinson, you 
mean : 

G. " Yes, he was so-called because he in- 
herited a wonderful year of prosperity and a 
full exchequer." 

F. " Was that the result of Vansittart's 
lowering of duties .? " 

G. " Vansittart wasn't at all an able man." 

F. "I only know about him from Miss 
Martineau's ' History of the Peace.' She 
gives him an excellent character, and so, I 
think, does Greville." 

G. " Two very different witnesses to char- 

83 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

acter. I've always heard he was a good 

man, but an able man ? No.*' 

* * 
* 

W. R. A. adds : " A financier of that period 
of whom Mr. Gladstone spoke with great 
respect was Mr. Herries, whose appointment 
as Chancellor of the Exchequer was an 
episode in the brief Ministry of Lord Gode- 
rich. I think that the name of Mr. Herries 
arose on another occasion than that referred 
to in the text, when Mr. G. was talking of 
the Crimean War and of the scanty recog- 
nition given to the services of Sidney Her- 
bert as Secretary at War. He then said that 
in time of war the work of organising sup- 
plies of all sorts was an ungrateful task, in 
which every shortcoming was denounced, 
while difficulties of administration were 
unheeded, and what was done well was 
unnoticed, and that the military men were 
always exacting beyond reason, and then he 

instanced Herries. Without the work done 
84 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

by Hemes, he said, the Peninsular campaign 
could not have been carried to a successful 
issue, and he referred me to a Memoir of the 
life of Herries in which he told me that I 
should find a full justification of his praise. 
Herries was Commissary-in-Chief from Oc- 
tober 1811-1816, and the Memoir, though 
in part of a controversial character, designed 
to rebut some disparaging remarks of Sir 
Spencer Walpole on Herries' qualifications as 
Chancellor of the Exchequer, establishes to 
the full Mr. Gladstone's estimate. But 
when did he, in the midst of politics, theo- 
logical controversies, and Homeric studies, 
find time to read a little known biography 
of an almost forgotten statesman ? " 

Letter of Feb. 2 {continued) 

W. R. A. then spoke of Sir James 
Graham's great work in administrative re- 
form, to which G. assented, but without 
enthusiasm. 

85 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

Chorus gradually gather round G. in a 
half-moon, and G. begins to lay down the 
law on finance. 

G. '* There isn't a country in Europe that 
has a sound system of finance except Eng- 
land. Now ril tell you what it is. The 
instant the financial year is ended we in 
England have a complete, though rough, 
account presented to the House of Com- 
mons." [" Complete though rough " were 
not his words. I think the word was " ap- 
proximate," but he used " complete though 
rough" a minute afterwards to describe the 
same thing.] " It could be presented on half 
a sheet of note-paper" — [he seized on that 
engine of finance, which happened to be 
lying on the table by his side, and flourished 
it about]. " Now the French Chamber has a 
most elaborate and detailed system, but no 
one knows how far the Ministers will keep 
to it in the coming year." [I gathered from 

this tirade that the French Ministry pretend 
86 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

to present their accounts to the nation, and 
really present only the shell or exterior of 
them, and are then at liberty to walk round 
parliamentary restrictions at will. This I 
am sure was his sense, though I couldn't 
understand the details.] " And all other 
European nations have followed the French 
instead of us. Their accounts are all a 
Sham. We should be amazed, for instance, 
if we could learn the truth of the financial 
state of Italy. The aggregate interest of her 
debt is greater than our own. Yet she has 
only been twenty or thirty years making it." 

Some one said : " I think she had a clean 
start before Florence became the capital ? " 

G. " Yes, I believe she started with a clean 
bill of health then. There may have been 
some slight debt over from Piedmont, but 
there was none from the other provinces." 

C. W. B, " And the local debts in Italy are 
so gigantic. In Naples they are raising loans 
at 15 per cent., and much the same in Rome." 
87 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

G. " Really ? It is amazing. But why 
don't the Italian funds fall ? they are still 
standing at 95. What do the people in 
Naples and Rome do for a livelihood t " 
[Ah, Mr. G., they were better off as honest 
brigands before you upset poor King Bomba.] 

C. W. B. ** Taxation has reached its limit 
in Italy, has it not ? " 

G. " I should say it had certainly.'* 

C. W. B. " And then there's the octroi." 
[G. shook his head sadly.] 

G. " But when I was last in Tuscany I 
saw no signs of distress ; jolly prosperous 
farmers, coming in with their goods to 
Florence; they have very easy landlords, 
and seem to have a fair market," 

F. " Val d'Arno's a very rich country — 
you mustn't judge the rest of Italy by 
that." 

B. thought the Po was in the Val d'Arno, 
and G. corrected him with great alacrity. 
Something then led Mr. G. to tell a story 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

of a Greek who found his way to Hawarden, 
knowing no word of English but TXaSa-rcov. 

G. " And I was at home at the time, and 
some of my people — the coachman, I think 
— went out and found him asleep in a barn 
— and at first they were for suspecting him ; 
but one of my sons went to him and they 
fetched me. I couldn't understand him, 
and my nephew Jack was there. Where's 
George ? Here, George, you're wanted — 
your brother was there, and he made him 
write down his Greek words of which we 
could't understand his pronunciation, and so 
we made out that he had come to see me." 

W. R. A. "And why.?" 

G. (rising and shaking himself like an old 

lion) : " Because he thought that in some 

way or other I was a friend of the Greeks. 

We didn't know what to do with the man ; 

he hadn't a penny in his pocket. Heaven 

knows how he got there. But I got him a 

place in the Greek Consulate at Liverpool, 
89 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

where he is doing very well, and he writes 
me grateful letters." 

W. " One is glad to know when an 
incident of that sort terminates so happily.'* 

I think this was the last point. It was 
I0.20 ; he rose and said good-night all round. 

[Then, of course, the rest of the juniors 
danced round F., harrying, badgering him, 
and pinching him to tell the story of the 
private interview of the morning ; of which, 
of course, A. H. H. has several splendid 
versions already going, the best perhaps being 
this : — 

"And then you know F. got in a blue 

funk when they were left alone and the door 

was shut, and Gladstone began in a solemn 

voice : ' The remarks which in your levity 

you made last night about Egypt , . .' and 

F. thought he must have been frightfully 

drunk over night and accused the old man 

on his foreign policy."] 

At 8.45 this morning in chapel Mr. 
90 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

Gladstone was resplendent in his Doctor's 
hood ; the Bible-clerk walked to T. R., our 
Dean, and asked who should read the Second 
Lesson, and then, on being told, went and 
led out the Great Man, who began at once : 
" Here beginneth the Twenty-First Chapter 
of St. Matthew's Gospel — No ; of the Reve- 
lation," and then read that great chapter 
very simply, with his broad rolling Lanca- 
shire accent. F. H. T., who is a born singer 
and orator, had already performed Genesis i. 
with extreme beauty. 



* 



T. R. afterwards told me that when he 
asked him before chapel whether he acknow- 
ledged the authority of the Dean {i.e. to send 
him out to read), the old man answered : 
" Mr. R., I acknowledge all constituted au- 
thority. I am the most conformable of men.'* 

" It is difficult," says T. R., " to describe 
Mr. Gladstone's rendering of the lesson ; 
there was no striving for effect, but his 
91 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

reverent sense of the message he was passing 
on to us, and his perfect articulation, seemed 
to invest the familiar words with a new 
meaning. One day, when he read the 
Second Lesson at the Cathedral, Canon 
Bright (a strong political opponent) was re- 
ported to have said : ' 1 can forgive him 
much for the light which he has thrown on 
the mind of St. Paul.' " 

C. G. L. adds : " Equally remarkable was 
his reading of the Psalms. His deep sonorous 
voice continued reading each verse long after 
the rest of us had finished it. I can see him 
now bending over the book as if absorbed in 
the effort to realise each word : he seemed 
quite oblivious of every one else in chapel ; 
and it was this same detachment that made 
his rendering of the Lesson so striking.** 

Letter of Feb. 2 {continued) 

At breakfast I was about the middle of 

the table and Mr. G. at the end, so I didn*t 
92 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

catch much. Sunday breakfast is always a 
fuller table than week-day. The conversa- 
tion was principally between A. H. H., 
A. C. H., and himself. 

G. " A Norwegian or a Dane is more like 
an Englishman than a German is, a South 
German more like a North German because 
of the Slavonic element so largely mixed 
with the population of Prussia, Mecklen- 
burg, and Pomerania" [? Wendish — and is a 
Wend a Slav or even an Aryan .?]. 

G. "I have lived out of, and again into, 
the period when it is the fashion to give 
Sunday breakfasts. Now there's my friends 
Lord and Lady S. ; they are famous for 
keeping the best table in London ; when I 
first stayed with them they (being very strict 
people about Sunday) would have no cooking 
done on that day, but next time I stayed I 
was surprised to find a hot breakfast and a 
large party — they had been obliged, they 
said, to give in." 

93 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

Followed a story about Christopher Words- 
worth which has escaped my memory. 

G. "Yes, I knew the Princess Lieven. 
She flattered and petted and toadied [the 
second Earl] Grey till she could twist 
him round her little finger. It was quite 
a dijfferent thing, as she found, when she 
tried to play the same game with Lord 
Aberdeen." 

I did not catch the whole of his remarks 
about Grey, but the general tone of them 
was, to my surprise, disparaging. 

G. "When I was an undergraduate we 
ate no lunch except Leman*s biscuits, which 
were all the thing then." 

A. C. H. " But you dined at five — what 
long evenings you must have had." [To 
my great regret I failed to hear more of 
this topic, but he went on for some time 
at it.] 

After to-night I shall have few chances of 
94 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

meeting him except breakfast ; he dines out 
every night for the next few days till he 
goes, which will be on Friday. 

Monday^ February 3, '90. — A poor budget. 
I thought I had had enough favour and kept 
discreetly in the background. At dinner 
last night there was a larger party, and I 
saw and heard nothing except when he 
chaffed me about my beard and said good- 
night to " Professor Pelham." 

Breakfast this morning ; he told an ex- 
cellent story apropos of the Duke of Cumber- 
land's and the Duke of Cambridge's habits 
of swearing. 

G. " Lord Mark Kerr had sworn at some 

troops at a review before the Queen. The 

Queen sent for the Duke of Cambridge and 

said he must reprimand Lord Mark, which 

the Duke did as follows : ' Look here, Mark, 

H.M. heard you swear, and she said she was 

damned if she'd stand it.' " 
95 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

G. " The English people are extra- 
ordinarily difficult to work up to excitement 
on any question ; one may hammer away at 
them, and very likely they will remain 
quite indifferent; and even if they wake 
up, unless you keep them hot long enough 
to carry it through they will go to sleep, 
and it may be fifty years before you can 
wake them up again." [What a commentary 
on recent politics ! ] 

G. [Eton again.] " Now when I was at 
Eton there were four classes of boys. There 
was the idle and clever boy, and perhaps 
he had the best enjoyment of all out of 
the school ; then there was the idle and 
stupid boy, and he was well off too, for his 
idleness compensated for his stupidity. The 
clever and industrious boy was not so well 
off; he did every one*s verses for them, and 
was generally made a beast of burden. But 
the worst off of all was the stupid and in- 
dustrious boy. He had nothing to compensate 
96 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

for his stupidity} I remember a specimen of 
the last class who had somehow or other 
achieved, with huge labour, a copy of 
Iambics. His tutor took them up between 
his finger and thumb, when they were pre- 
sented, and said, with a contemptuous air, 
*Todd, what demon has prompted you to 
rush into Greek verse r ' " 

G. ^' I was present in Convocation at 
Oxford when the question of CathoHc 
Emancipation was before the country." 

A. C. H. "I suppose there was a brave 
debate." 

G. " Debate, sir, not at all. Congre- 
gation \sic\ agreed by — votes to five 
(slapping his hand on the table) to peti- 

1 This story was evidendy a favourite of Mr. 
Gladstone'^s. I see from the Life that he had 
already told it in two speeches to schools, one at 
Mill Hill and the other at Marlborough. The 
next story is also mentioned in the Life. 
97 G 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

tion Parliament against Catholic Emanci- 
pation." ^ 

G. [Of Scottish patriotism, Carnegie 
again.] '* I remember one passage in 'his 
book. His first ideas of the majesty of 
office were derived from the Provost and 
Corporation of Dunfermline in their robes 
and chains (he was born at Dunfermline). 
' What Mecca/ he says, ' is to the Moslem, 
what Jerusalem is to the Jew, what Rome 
is to the Catholic, that, and more than that, 
Dunfermline is and will always be to me.' 
He has a true Scottish patriotism." 



* 



T. R. once got Mr. Gladstone to talk 
of the Free Church of Scotland : " I spoke 
of Chalmers as a ' High Churchman ' ; he 
demurred to the phrase : ' No doubt there 
was a certain agreement between high Pres- 

1 In the Life, where he again tells this story, 
the gist is the same, but he mentions forty-seven 
votes as given against the majority. 
98 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

byterians and high Anglicans, but not funda- 
mental agreement,' and then he passed from 
the topic. I think his view was that a 
Church might have deep spiritual life though 
deprived of ' spiritual independence ' ; but 
that there cannot be a deep religious life 
in a Church which has not an adequate sense 
of the importance of the Sacraments." 

On the whole I am surprised to remember 
that there was little theological talk. He 
exhibited (on the first afternoon, I think) 
much interest in the fact that Bismarck had 
recently received a theological degree, and 
said that he was surprised that Jowett held 
no degree in theology. C. G. L. was able 
to inform him that Jowett was a Doctor 
in Theology of the University of Leyden. 

There is an unaccountable lacuna in the 

letters between February 3 and 8. Letters 

were certainly written each day, though none 

so long as those of February I and 2, and 

99 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

I think that on each day, except one when 
Mr. Gladstone breakfasted out, I met him 
at breakfast. It is possible that the letters 
were lent to friends or otherwise mislaid. 

Saturday^ February 8. — Well, it's all over, 
and the great man is gone. The Domestic 
Bursar said last night it would be quite a 
relief when he had quitted the College 
without any mishap, for he (the bursar) felt 
such a responsibility on his shoulders. Last 
night there was a great party at W. R. A.'s 
house, and my wife and I were invited to 
the drawing-room. When the gentlemen 
came in from the dining-room, Mr. Glad- 
stone came in alone and looked round, and 
presently came and talked to me. I presented 
my wife, and we had a good deal of pleasant 
talk. He was exceedingly polite and kind 
to her, but it was quite evident that his 
old Oxonian Toryism resented the idea of 
" married Fellov/s," and we heard from other 
sources that the v/hole of the woman element 

lOO 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

in modern Oxford was profoundly distasteful 

to him. 

* * 
* 

T. R. further elucidates this point : " He 
spoke kindly of efforts to improve the 
education of women : one of his own 
daughters was a tutor at Newnham, Cam- 
bridge ; but colleges for women at Oxford ! 
— a deep 'Ah' indicated that Mr. Glad- 
stone had misgivings. When Mrs. Gladstone 
was in Oxford, a lady spoke of her visit as 
a ' pleasant surprise ' ; ' Not at all, not at 
all, ma'am,' said the old man in a tragic 
voice, 'there are far too many ladies in 
Oxford already.' " 

Letter of Feb. 8 {continued') 

He told a lovely story about a Highland 
boatman which I reserve till we meet, and 
then got on to the late Bishop of Durham, 
whom he had met at Braemar and in Norway, 
and was much interested when I said that 
I had been in his house at Bournemouth 

lOI 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

during his last illness. He remembered 
J. R. H.^ on the Braemar visit, and asked 
what he was doing. He spoke much of the 
hurry of life in modern Oxford, and I said 
that I believed if the terms were longer we 
should not be so hustled. He agreed, and 
commended the Scottish system of six 
months' term, and when I said everything 
Scottish was to be commended, he smiled 
cordial approval, and spoke of the nobility 
of the Scottish student life and the peck 
of meal in the garret. Harcourt came up, 
and the wife and I retired. He at once 
began to Harcourt on Homer, which, as the 
latter is a man of science pure and simple, 
was a little hard on him. When he said 
good-night to me, which he did very 
warmly, he said how happy he had been 
in College and how he would gladly end 
his days here. But, truth to tell, he was 
tired to-night, and, though I suppose he 
^ The present Bishop of Rochester. 



102 



Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 

lives an even more exciting life all the 
year round, the mere amount of talking 
that he does is bound to take it out of a 
man of his age. 



* 



This is the end of the letters. 

The generation that knew Mr. Gladstone 
personally is passing away, and, as Lord 
Rosebery recently pointed out, the combina- 
tion of " bookishness " and statesmanship — 
to use the word " statesmanship " in its 
popular sense, as equivalent to " the art of 
governing " — is becoming rarer every year. 
But we who were young when Mr. Gladstone 
was old will, I think, never regret the week 
which we spent in the company of one 
whom the most pressing and arduous duties 
of political life had never been able to 
divorce from his catholic affection for all 
manner of books, and in whom no changes 
of political standpoint had weakened his 

affection for the University of Oxford. 
103 



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